If it were simply a matter of not liking the bills being offered, they could simply hold the vote and go on record as rejecting them. But they have refused to vote on budgets because they didn't want to be on record.
The Constitution, as you point, puts the power of the purse in the House (part of the deal that set up the bicameral legislature). It's not unlike the Senate having to approve Presidential appointments. And just like with Presidential appointments, the Senate is really just supposed to filter out the total crap - not try to micromanage the final product.
The last time the Senate passed a budget was April 2009. Even before the Republicans controlled the House the Democrats couldn't pass a budget. They were supposed to pass a budget before the 111th congress ended in 2010 but failed despite controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency.
I think Congress has to share that title with the President. On the rare occasion that Congress begins to do something useful the President threatens to veto it.
Free trade with no tariffs is causing the economic collapse and closure of manufacturing due to the unfair wage difference between China and the Western world.
What is this "free trade" you speak of? Look into China's trade practices and you won't find much freedom. What you will find is a lot of Chinese government pressure on foreign companies both politically (try speaking out against China in America and then trying to do trade with them) and for money (build a factory with cool new technology, then lose it to the party officials' children).
Well there are so many ways it is hard to remember all of them. Certainly the debt is a problem. But let's go with one we all remember and that is generally given favorable press coverage: the auto company bailout.
One of the key features of capitalism is that failures are destroyed to make room for success. For example, when an auto company doesn't perform it should go out of business. If unions were a large factor in pushing it to fail, the unions involved should suffer and be discredited. However, when the government steps into undermine contracts rather than enforcing them, giving money to political backers (i.e. the unions) rather than following the rule of law, and treating a company as "too big to fail", it damages capitalism (not to mention society at large).
Think of all the wonderful things the USA could afford to do if we weren't so busy destroying capitalism. We've got record numbers of people out of work and on government assistance and an administration who only knows how to grow Washington DC in response. We are in a death spiral because we treat our elections like another episode of American Idol. We have a blueprint of how to be free and prosperous, but nobody pays attention to it anymore.
Even if China tops out at a per capita GDP only half of what the US has, they'll still have an overall GDP nearly twice that of the America with all the capability for spending on R&D and military that that implies.
Some people like to point out that Japan eventually slowed down, which true, but only after it had a per capita GDP that was comparable America. The top developed nations aren't that far apart when it comes to that number. You can put up great growth numbers while catching up, but once you build your factories and educate your workers it is hard to really break out from the pack. Japan, with a population roughly half that of America, caught up and found its total GDP limited. China, with a population roughly double that of America, will go a lot further in terms of total GDP if they come anywhere close to the developed world in per capita GDP.
And China has a strong sense of resentful nationalism (alarmingly similar to what Japan and Germany once had).
No intelligent person would accept that statement. They make very good optics (once upon a time not so but now very good) - go buy a good telescope in the USA - it is most likely made in Mainland China or Taiwan
Well which country makes the optics? If Taiwan then it is irrelevent to the discussion. Although Taiwan was a colony of China in the 1800s the two countries are now very different places. You can't claim China is advanced simply because a colony 100 years ago makes good optics!
I assume the reasons the Soviet Union didn't use nukes on Afghanistan that the world opinion fallout would have been bad (and their contest with the free world included trying to convince people the Soviet Union wasn't evil), and that nukes wouldn't have provided much tactical advantage in the guerilla style war they were facing anyway. The Afghans didn't control any industrialized cities whose destruction would help the war effort.
Following WWII the Russians had a lot of troops all set to fight. They took over eastern Europe. Without American nuclear weapons, what would have stopped Russia from taking over all of Europe once Russia obtained nuclear weapons? It would have been the exact scenario you describe "If you think a well armed bully country like the [Soviet Union] might attack you having a nuclear weapon might be good insurance."
Actually it's pretty easy to say it. They have never thwarted an attack. Ever.
American nuclear weapons never successfully retaliated against a single attack from the Soviet Union. Not a single one. Nor did they ever stop inbound Soviet Missiles. Ever.
Sometimes the measure of a success for defense is in finding that the defense never seems necessary.
For example, I don't want America to build a wall on the Mexican border that allows us catch infiltrators. I want us to build a wall when people see it they give up and go home to apply for visa.
Re:I used it. Once.
on
Perl Turns 25
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What I found in using Perl was that no two Perl programmers could read each others code. Much of the expressiveness and versatility that people talk about comes at the expense of a huge amount of syntax and the ability of the language to assume values (like $_ instead of requiring them to be explicit). What happens in practice is people learn a subset of syntax which is large enough to do what they need to do and it often isn't the same subset that someone else learned. And when reading someone else's code, it can be very difficult to look things up because it often isn't even clear what the syntax is (in part because so much gets assumed).
When the boss hands me a flat text file with 50,000 lines in some random format that needs to be parsed and loaded into the database, I dust off my Perl book and write a short application to read each line and spit out SQL. I don't need the safety of Java or the byte processing of C. I don't need to handle every possible exception that could be thrown when opening a file. I don't need a GUI. I just need to open a file, read a line of text, use some regular expressions, do some tokenizing, and spit out more text into a separate file. Perl is fantastic for that. But I don't find much other use for Perl.
What happens when even artistry is done better by computers?
At that point, the "job" of a human will be to own the computer, an arrangement that will last until computers are smart enough to own humans.
So what happens when the computer owning human goes out of business because he's not very good at owning a computer? It's not like he can go work for someone else.
When everyone's job is to own a computer, how do we allocate computers to people? Who decides how many computers you get and what kinds of computers you get? This will be quite a different society than our current psuedo-capitalist system and it is very unclear how we get from here to there.
Until the point where the robots are better able to handle the complexity than most humans are. When that happens, most humans won't be able to find jobs.
I'm not talking about a scenario where we have robotic overlords. I'm concerned about the scenario which maybe 50% of the people become unemployable because their labor can't compete with low-cost robot labor. Our current economic system will have a hard time adjusting to the problem. This will happen a long time before we reach the point where everyone can sit around and relax all day. And getting to that point may prove difficult as people will still want to compete with each other for power and profit.
The industrial revolution replaced jobs that were pure manual labor. But jobs that required both manual labor and intelligence were hard to automate. Jobs that required manual labor and artistry were hard to automate.
What happens when computers become intelligent than a large part of the population?
In the 19 century, much manual work was replaced, but the human mind was still required for many tasks - including much factory and farm labor. But is every single human being employable? Is every single human being capable of contributing more to the economy than they demand in food, clothing, housing, waste disposal, etc.?
There are some people who clearly aren't. A comatose patient of course does not contribute. What about paralyzed person who isn't smart enough to do any mental work (at least not any that couldn't be performed more cheaply by a computer)? As computers become more and more sophisticated, we'll be able to move more and more people into the "can't pull their own weight when compared to a computer" category.
We already know machines can outperform humans at most jobs that require strength. If the process is repetitive then the machines don't even need operators. For delicate work we also find that machines outperform humans. Basically physical labor is no longer needed from humans except when combined with a need for human intelligence or artistry What happens when computers are able to out-think humans? I haven't an artistic bone in my body and mass media has made it so we don't need many artists anyway. What happens when even artistry is done better by computers?
10C is cool but easy to handle with a light coat, 20C is comfortable room temperature. Anything over 30C is freaking hot.
This is a good example of why we like Fahrenheit. We can easily talk about more than three temperature ranges.
In the 30s you need a warm but not superwarm coat. In the 40s you need similar coat but you'll feel more comfortable wearing it. In the 50s you have light jacket weather. In the 60s the light jacket is optional. The 70s are perfect. The 80s are hot enough for swimming but not uncomfortably hot. The 90s are uncomfortably hot. Over 100 and you pretty much stay indoors.
If you want to be more precise you can say the "low 90s" (still good swimming weather) or "high 90s" (good swimming weather for youngster, indoor weather for older people)
And in the winter w can talk about the weather being in the 20s or teens, or perhaps near 0. It has to get pretty cold before we need to go negative (although there are plenty of places up north that need to do that regularly).
Ummm.... nope? Celsius is much more useful than Fahrenheit in virtually every application where the other people you're communicating with know Celcius but not Fahrenheit, and as far as I know only you Americans still use it.
Americans use Fahrenheit too. Where is Usia? Or did you misspell Asia. There aren't too many Asians that use Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit give you more precision before needing to resort to decimal points or fractions. Fahrenheit neatly boxes what humans regularly experience between the values 0 and 100 while managing to have the freezing point of water at 2^5.
Highly unlikely. Americans have been learning Celsius since the 1970s. AFAIK every other country has succumbed to using Celsius only. So anyone using Fahrenheit is likely to be American and is therefor likely to know Celsius. This is especially true for NASA which uses metric for pretty much everything.
For some reason the writer didn't feel bound to use the government mandated system and therefore chose the more convenient Fahrenheit system.
So where does Joe get his information about the scientists from? Newspapers, magazines, the TV. Unfortunately Joe long ago learned that those sources are full of crap and will willingly attempt to mislead him, or maybe even lie to him, in order to push agendas that the journalists want to push. Joe has learned to be very skeptical of those news sources.
This always amazes me. Why is Joe skeptical about these news sources? Because they refuse to publish stories which Joe knows is true, like Obama's "true religion" or proof that Susan Rice personally massacred our ambassador or whatever. So instead Joe believes "facts" from the people who are shrilly claiming that all media is lying (except them, of course).
No, it comes from watching reporting on something you know about either from first-hand experience or from having studied the topic in some depth. Or sometimes it comes from noticing that certain ideas are simply be ignored. For example, I lived in Taiwan for a while and since leaving it have followed the news carefully and have invested some time in learning about Taiwan's history. It is quite common for me to notice mistakes or slants in the reporting about Taiwan.
Another topic I have strong feelings about is illegal immigration. I've noticed that whenever the topic starts to get a lot of talk, the Washington Post gets into gear writing as many positive stories as they can about immigration. Did you catch the omission there? The topic of attention is illegal immigration but the WP writes positive stories about immigrants and about immigration in general while glossing over the question of legality. The WP will paint the issue as a choice between deporting millions of people and granting them all amesty, with no mention of possibly doing everything we can to secure the border (I'm all in favor of amnesty once people start deciding attempting to cross the border is futile because it is nearly impossible). The WP will drop all kinds of hints, some subtle some blantant, that all opponents of illegal immigration are racists.
This is crazy. This is stupid. This is a far more serious threat to democracy than anything any US politician has done in the last 50 years.
I agree. The biased reporting is indeed a serious threat. But I'm not sure what do about it because limiting the freedom of the press would be an even greater threat.
Our media is not perfect, but (aside from a few glaring examples) is pretty good. Most of its shortcomings are due to you and me, not some nefarious plot to rule the world.
I think there is some truth to what you say about people's desire for short shocking stories being a problem. But on the question of bias I think it results more from the people who choose to go in to journalism and a sort of echo chamber that has resulted. People who choose journalism as a career - who like words and persuasion - tend to think a certain way. For some reason they tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. They eventually become the people that run the journalism schools so that new journalism students who may not be liberal to begin with eventually become so through peer pressure and from lack of exposure to other views. The students who were liberal to begin with become even more so for the same reasons.
In a few cases of biases, such as the Washington Post's handling of immigration, I believe the bias is deliberate and dispicable. But in most cases I think it simply a matter of a person's writing reflecting the beliefs of the person doing the writing. A reporter has a deadline and it takes a lot of time to carefully scrutinize your own writing to get rid of any bias and even if you have time you won't totally succeed.
You can see the problem with #1 right off the back. Which "other people" should Joe Sixpack trust? Scientists are people. Their religious leader, or the local politician, or their next door neighbor are all people as well. What differentiates a scientist from all those other people? Well, a scientist has a degree certifying the person's knowledge in an area. Only, a certificate is merely a piece of paper. Accepting that the degree implies expertness is a matter of trust as well. But what about all those other people, i.e. religious leader, politician, or neighbor? Those people are closer to Joe Sixpack. They have a constant and direct influence on their lives, and have already gained some measure of trust.
At this point, the more introspective and thoughtful Joe Sixpack would recognize that the latter group of people are not experts on the matter. So yeah, they might be trustworthy in the eyes of Joe Sixpack, but they probably know nothing about the climate and how it works (sure, if they're lucky, they live near a climate scientists, but that's rare). So they discard option #1, and go for option #2.
The trick then, for Joe Sixpack, is figuring out what the scientists believe because unfortunately Joe isn't personally aquanted with very many climate scientists, or weather scientiests, or maybe even scientists in general. So where does Joe get his information about the scientists from? Newspapers, magazines, the TV. Unfortunately Joe long ago learned that those sources are full of crap and will willingly attempt to mislead him, or maybe even lie to him, in order to push agendas that the journalists want to push. Joe has learned to be very skeptical of those news sources. So when those news sources tell him that a lot of scientists say global warming is real, Joe is skeptical. And when Joe sees that this is what the news sources are saying after Al Gore made a big deal out of it, and Joe knows how cozy journalists are with the Democratic party, Joe is even more skeptical.
When Joe reads what newspapers say about topics he knows about, Joe sees how badly those newspapers spin things. So how do you expect Joe to trust the newspapers on topics he knows nothing about?
None of that is truly surprising, but it leads to a couple interesting points. First, the concrete here-and-now communication strategy is probably a good one for those whose opinions aren't firmly set — fully 75 percent of Americans, according to the polling. But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 8 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise.
Nor, we can assume, will it get anywhere with the authors of the article.
Slashdot Mirror
The Ryan budget passed the House in March. The Senate refused to vote on it for 2 months. Then when they saw in an off-cycle election that part of the plan (reforming medicare) could be successfully attacked, they decided to vote on it just so the could use it to attack the Republicans. The Democrat controlled Senate also voted down the Obama plan (97-0). The Democrats also voted down a budget offered by Toomey and passed by the House.
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/219093-paul-ryan-budget-passes-house-with-ten-republican-defections
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/163307-senate-votes-down-ryan-budget-medicare-
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55721.html
If it were simply a matter of not liking the bills being offered, they could simply hold the vote and go on record as rejecting them. But they have refused to vote on budgets because they didn't want to be on record.
The Constitution, as you point, puts the power of the purse in the House (part of the deal that set up the bicameral legislature). It's not unlike the Senate having to approve Presidential appointments. And just like with Presidential appointments, the Senate is really just supposed to filter out the total crap - not try to micromanage the final product.
The last time the Senate passed a budget was April 2009. Even before the Republicans controlled the House the Democrats couldn't pass a budget. They were supposed to pass a budget before the 111th congress ended in 2010 but failed despite controlling the House, Senate, and Presidency.
I think Congress has to share that title with the President. On the rare occasion that Congress begins to do something useful the President threatens to veto it.
And six decades ago they only shared a government for 4 years. Prior to that they were separat governments going back to 1895.
Free trade with no tariffs is causing the economic collapse and closure of manufacturing due to the unfair wage difference between China and the Western world.
What is this "free trade" you speak of? Look into China's trade practices and you won't find much freedom. What you will find is a lot of Chinese government pressure on foreign companies both politically (try speaking out against China in America and then trying to do trade with them) and for money (build a factory with cool new technology, then lose it to the party officials' children).
Well there are so many ways it is hard to remember all of them. Certainly the debt is a problem. But let's go with one we all remember and that is generally given favorable press coverage: the auto company bailout. One of the key features of capitalism is that failures are destroyed to make room for success. For example, when an auto company doesn't perform it should go out of business. If unions were a large factor in pushing it to fail, the unions involved should suffer and be discredited. However, when the government steps into undermine contracts rather than enforcing them, giving money to political backers (i.e. the unions) rather than following the rule of law, and treating a company as "too big to fail", it damages capitalism (not to mention society at large).
Think of all the wonderful things the USA could afford to do if we weren't so busy destroying capitalism. We've got record numbers of people out of work and on government assistance and an administration who only knows how to grow Washington DC in response. We are in a death spiral because we treat our elections like another episode of American Idol. We have a blueprint of how to be free and prosperous, but nobody pays attention to it anymore.
The administration did spend some money on R&D. It gave the money to a company that did some R&D and was then sold, presumably along with the R&D, to China. ( http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/09/us-a123-sale-confirmation-idUSBRE8B80I420121209 )
Even if China tops out at a per capita GDP only half of what the US has, they'll still have an overall GDP nearly twice that of the America with all the capability for spending on R&D and military that that implies.
Some people like to point out that Japan eventually slowed down, which true, but only after it had a per capita GDP that was comparable America. The top developed nations aren't that far apart when it comes to that number. You can put up great growth numbers while catching up, but once you build your factories and educate your workers it is hard to really break out from the pack. Japan, with a population roughly half that of America, caught up and found its total GDP limited. China, with a population roughly double that of America, will go a lot further in terms of total GDP if they come anywhere close to the developed world in per capita GDP.
And China has a strong sense of resentful nationalism (alarmingly similar to what Japan and Germany once had).
No intelligent person would accept that statement. They make very good optics (once upon a time not so but now very good) - go buy a good telescope in the USA - it is most likely made in Mainland China or Taiwan
Well which country makes the optics? If Taiwan then it is irrelevent to the discussion. Although Taiwan was a colony of China in the 1800s the two countries are now very different places. You can't claim China is advanced simply because a colony 100 years ago makes good optics!
I assume the reasons the Soviet Union didn't use nukes on Afghanistan that the world opinion fallout would have been bad (and their contest with the free world included trying to convince people the Soviet Union wasn't evil), and that nukes wouldn't have provided much tactical advantage in the guerilla style war they were facing anyway. The Afghans didn't control any industrialized cities whose destruction would help the war effort.
Following WWII the Russians had a lot of troops all set to fight. They took over eastern Europe. Without American nuclear weapons, what would have stopped Russia from taking over all of Europe once Russia obtained nuclear weapons? It would have been the exact scenario you describe "If you think a well armed bully country like the [Soviet Union] might attack you having a nuclear weapon might be good insurance."
Actually it's pretty easy to say it. They have never thwarted an attack. Ever.
American nuclear weapons never successfully retaliated against a single attack from the Soviet Union. Not a single one. Nor did they ever stop inbound Soviet Missiles. Ever.
Sometimes the measure of a success for defense is in finding that the defense never seems necessary.
For example, I don't want America to build a wall on the Mexican border that allows us catch infiltrators. I want us to build a wall when people see it they give up and go home to apply for visa.
What I found in using Perl was that no two Perl programmers could read each others code. Much of the expressiveness and versatility that people talk about comes at the expense of a huge amount of syntax and the ability of the language to assume values (like $_ instead of requiring them to be explicit). What happens in practice is people learn a subset of syntax which is large enough to do what they need to do and it often isn't the same subset that someone else learned. And when reading someone else's code, it can be very difficult to look things up because it often isn't even clear what the syntax is (in part because so much gets assumed).
When the boss hands me a flat text file with 50,000 lines in some random format that needs to be parsed and loaded into the database, I dust off my Perl book and write a short application to read each line and spit out SQL. I don't need the safety of Java or the byte processing of C. I don't need to handle every possible exception that could be thrown when opening a file. I don't need a GUI. I just need to open a file, read a line of text, use some regular expressions, do some tokenizing, and spit out more text into a separate file. Perl is fantastic for that. But I don't find much other use for Perl.
What happens when even artistry is done better by computers?
At that point, the "job" of a human will be to own the computer, an arrangement that will last until computers are smart enough to own humans.
So what happens when the computer owning human goes out of business because he's not very good at owning a computer? It's not like he can go work for someone else.
When everyone's job is to own a computer, how do we allocate computers to people? Who decides how many computers you get and what kinds of computers you get? This will be quite a different society than our current psuedo-capitalist system and it is very unclear how we get from here to there.
Until the point where the robots are better able to handle the complexity than most humans are. When that happens, most humans won't be able to find jobs.
I'm not talking about a scenario where we have robotic overlords. I'm concerned about the scenario which maybe 50% of the people become unemployable because their labor can't compete with low-cost robot labor. Our current economic system will have a hard time adjusting to the problem. This will happen a long time before we reach the point where everyone can sit around and relax all day. And getting to that point may prove difficult as people will still want to compete with each other for power and profit.
The industrial revolution replaced jobs that were pure manual labor. But jobs that required both manual labor and intelligence were hard to automate. Jobs that required manual labor and artistry were hard to automate.
What happens when computers become intelligent than a large part of the population?
In the 19 century, much manual work was replaced, but the human mind was still required for many tasks - including much factory and farm labor. But is every single human being employable? Is every single human being capable of contributing more to the economy than they demand in food, clothing, housing, waste disposal, etc.?
There are some people who clearly aren't. A comatose patient of course does not contribute. What about paralyzed person who isn't smart enough to do any mental work (at least not any that couldn't be performed more cheaply by a computer)? As computers become more and more sophisticated, we'll be able to move more and more people into the "can't pull their own weight when compared to a computer" category.
We already know machines can outperform humans at most jobs that require strength. If the process is repetitive then the machines don't even need operators. For delicate work we also find that machines outperform humans. Basically physical labor is no longer needed from humans except when combined with a need for human intelligence or artistry What happens when computers are able to out-think humans? I haven't an artistic bone in my body and mass media has made it so we don't need many artists anyway. What happens when even artistry is done better by computers?
10C is cool but easy to handle with a light coat, 20C is comfortable room temperature. Anything over 30C is freaking hot.
This is a good example of why we like Fahrenheit. We can easily talk about more than three temperature ranges. In the 30s you need a warm but not superwarm coat. In the 40s you need similar coat but you'll feel more comfortable wearing it. In the 50s you have light jacket weather. In the 60s the light jacket is optional. The 70s are perfect. The 80s are hot enough for swimming but not uncomfortably hot. The 90s are uncomfortably hot. Over 100 and you pretty much stay indoors.
If you want to be more precise you can say the "low 90s" (still good swimming weather) or "high 90s" (good swimming weather for youngster, indoor weather for older people)
And in the winter w can talk about the weather being in the 20s or teens, or perhaps near 0. It has to get pretty cold before we need to go negative (although there are plenty of places up north that need to do that regularly).
FTFY:
Ummm.... nope? Celsius is much more useful than Fahrenheit in virtually every application where the other people you're communicating with know Celcius but not Fahrenheit, and as far as I know only you Americans still use it.
(AFIK there is no such places as Usia.)
Americans use Fahrenheit too. Where is Usia? Or did you misspell Asia. There aren't too many Asians that use Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit give you more precision before needing to resort to decimal points or fractions. Fahrenheit neatly boxes what humans regularly experience between the values 0 and 100 while managing to have the freezing point of water at 2^5.
This is one of the few times that I'd rather see the temperature in the Rankine scale over Fahrenheit!
Essentially, they had 4 systems to choose from (Kelvin would be ideal), and they picked the very worst choice!
Kelvin would have been better, but Fahrenheit wasn't the worst choice available. They could have chosen Celsius.
Highly unlikely. Americans have been learning Celsius since the 1970s. AFAIK every other country has succumbed to using Celsius only. So anyone using Fahrenheit is likely to be American and is therefor likely to know Celsius. This is especially true for NASA which uses metric for pretty much everything.
For some reason the writer didn't feel bound to use the government mandated system and therefore chose the more convenient Fahrenheit system.
So where does Joe get his information about the scientists from? Newspapers, magazines, the TV. Unfortunately Joe long ago learned that those sources are full of crap and will willingly attempt to mislead him, or maybe even lie to him, in order to push agendas that the journalists want to push. Joe has learned to be very skeptical of those news sources.
This always amazes me. Why is Joe skeptical about these news sources? Because they refuse to publish stories which Joe knows is true, like Obama's "true religion" or proof that Susan Rice personally massacred our ambassador or whatever. So instead Joe believes "facts" from the people who are shrilly claiming that all media is lying (except them, of course).
No, it comes from watching reporting on something you know about either from first-hand experience or from having studied the topic in some depth. Or sometimes it comes from noticing that certain ideas are simply be ignored. For example, I lived in Taiwan for a while and since leaving it have followed the news carefully and have invested some time in learning about Taiwan's history. It is quite common for me to notice mistakes or slants in the reporting about Taiwan.
Another topic I have strong feelings about is illegal immigration. I've noticed that whenever the topic starts to get a lot of talk, the Washington Post gets into gear writing as many positive stories as they can about immigration. Did you catch the omission there? The topic of attention is illegal immigration but the WP writes positive stories about immigrants and about immigration in general while glossing over the question of legality. The WP will paint the issue as a choice between deporting millions of people and granting them all amesty, with no mention of possibly doing everything we can to secure the border (I'm all in favor of amnesty once people start deciding attempting to cross the border is futile because it is nearly impossible). The WP will drop all kinds of hints, some subtle some blantant, that all opponents of illegal immigration are racists.
This is crazy. This is stupid. This is a far more serious threat to democracy than anything any US politician has done in the last 50 years.
I agree. The biased reporting is indeed a serious threat. But I'm not sure what do about it because limiting the freedom of the press would be an even greater threat.
Our media is not perfect, but (aside from a few glaring examples) is pretty good. Most of its shortcomings are due to you and me, not some nefarious plot to rule the world.
I think there is some truth to what you say about people's desire for short shocking stories being a problem. But on the question of bias I think it results more from the people who choose to go in to journalism and a sort of echo chamber that has resulted. People who choose journalism as a career - who like words and persuasion - tend to think a certain way. For some reason they tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. They eventually become the people that run the journalism schools so that new journalism students who may not be liberal to begin with eventually become so through peer pressure and from lack of exposure to other views. The students who were liberal to begin with become even more so for the same reasons.
In a few cases of biases, such as the Washington Post's handling of immigration, I believe the bias is deliberate and dispicable. But in most cases I think it simply a matter of a person's writing reflecting the beliefs of the person doing the writing. A reporter has a deadline and it takes a lot of time to carefully scrutinize your own writing to get rid of any bias and even if you have time you won't totally succeed.
You can see the problem with #1 right off the back. Which "other people" should Joe Sixpack trust? Scientists are people. Their religious leader, or the local politician, or their next door neighbor are all people as well. What differentiates a scientist from all those other people? Well, a scientist has a degree certifying the person's knowledge in an area. Only, a certificate is merely a piece of paper. Accepting that the degree implies expertness is a matter of trust as well. But what about all those other people, i.e. religious leader, politician, or neighbor? Those people are closer to Joe Sixpack. They have a constant and direct influence on their lives, and have already gained some measure of trust.
At this point, the more introspective and thoughtful Joe Sixpack would recognize that the latter group of people are not experts on the matter. So yeah, they might be trustworthy in the eyes of Joe Sixpack, but they probably know nothing about the climate and how it works (sure, if they're lucky, they live near a climate scientists, but that's rare). So they discard option #1, and go for option #2.
The trick then, for Joe Sixpack, is figuring out what the scientists believe because unfortunately Joe isn't personally aquanted with very many climate scientists, or weather scientiests, or maybe even scientists in general. So where does Joe get his information about the scientists from? Newspapers, magazines, the TV. Unfortunately Joe long ago learned that those sources are full of crap and will willingly attempt to mislead him, or maybe even lie to him, in order to push agendas that the journalists want to push. Joe has learned to be very skeptical of those news sources. So when those news sources tell him that a lot of scientists say global warming is real, Joe is skeptical. And when Joe sees that this is what the news sources are saying after Al Gore made a big deal out of it, and Joe knows how cozy journalists are with the Democratic party, Joe is even more skeptical.
When Joe reads what newspapers say about topics he knows about, Joe sees how badly those newspapers spin things. So how do you expect Joe to trust the newspapers on topics he knows nothing about?
None of that is truly surprising, but it leads to a couple interesting points. First, the concrete here-and-now communication strategy is probably a good one for those whose opinions aren't firmly set — fully 75 percent of Americans, according to the polling. But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 8 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise.
Nor, we can assume, will it get anywhere with the authors of the article.
My point is that Congress should be impeaching for those things. Once they do so then I will no longer have a point.